What Happened to My Process Engine?

Friday, September 30, 2016

Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Vice President, Product Marketing

A check engine light for business process applications

Advances in technology can be seen in all parts of life. For example, the technology in most cars sold today is probably far more advanced than what was used to put Neil Armstrong on the moon. With airbags, GPS and automatic braking systems, driving a car has never been easier or safer.

However, all that added technology comes with a price. As a driver and a car owner, keeping track of the performance of all these systems can be overwhelming and confusing. With so many components that could go wrong, how can anyone keep ahead of trouble and avoid being stranded on a dark road without any warning?

It only takes a quick glance at a current car’s dashboard to see the answer. With the addition of each new advanced system, car makers are adding monitors and alerts to the dashboard in the form of various warning lights to advise drivers of a looming problem. For example, the tire pressure warning has caught many a driver by surprise because it seems so difficult to measure tire pressure in real time. After seeing that warning indicator, it takes only a few minutes of simple activity to fix the issue whereas in the past it would have taken a specific inspection of the tires to be warned of issues.

For savvy users designing their first business process applications, the same challenges exist. With so much power at their fingertips, it is pretty easy to get in trouble without any clues as to how to detect or fix the issues. K2’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) was designed to assist with just that. As designers are creating their applications, ALM watches what is happening in the background, gives designers a heads up when something is wrong, and even offers options to fix the issue right there. Issues like forms dependencies and underlying data changes can stop an application in its tracks but with ALM, the designer is alerted proactively of these issues and offered ways to fix them. This can be especially important when multiple people are working on separate parts of the application at the same time.

Just as a driver may take their car in for a tune-up or an inspection before a big road trip, a K2 application designer can benefit from K2’s ALM visual error notifications to save the team lots of time and effort before the application is rolled out to users.

For more information on how K2’s Application Lifecycle Management can help your team design great applications that work the first time they are deployed, check out this video.